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These are (lightly edited) topic notes I wrote for a unit I'm teaching into in a few weeks, HIST332/HIST432 History as Film. The basic format is that students watch a historical film chosen by an academic to fit a specific theme, who also gives a lecture and leads a seminar discussion on the film. My theme is 'capturing historical reality on film', and the obvious choice (for me!) was Battle of Britain (1969). The lecture will have rather less Barthes and Baudrillard and more bombers and Blitzes!

It may seem obvious that films shouldn't be confused with reality. We watch them precisely because they aren't real - they are escapist fantasies which take us away from our lives for a couple of hours. Wherever films take us, we know that when they are over we'll be right back where we started. But a large part of the reason why films are so brilliantly successful at transporting us in this way is precisely because of the way they are able to produce an illusion of reality -- what Roland Barthes calls a 'reality effect'. They appear real -- or even realer than real, hyperreal, in Jean Baudrillard's phrase. So the question is perhaps, can we avoid confusing films with reality?

Generally, though, we aren't quite fooled by this apparent reality effect. We may willingly suspend our disbelief when we watch them, but only for a short period, not permanently. It's understood that the stories we watch on screen never happened and the characters within them never existed. Christian Grey is just as unreal as Imperator Furiosa. But there's an important exception to this rule, which is of course the historical film. These do try to depict actual events and actual people. The extent to which they do so in a way which would satisfy historians is, of course, highly variable, to say the least. But not everyone watching historical films is a historian, let alone one specialising in the events being portrayed. Inevitably then, some, perhaps most, people will come away from a historical film thinking that it does more or less represent wie es eigentlich gewesen -- 'how it actually happened' or 'how it essentially was', in Leopold von Ranke's famous phrase. In other words the simulation replaces what it is simulating: hyperreality displaces reality.

This week we'll be looking at how one particular historical film, Battle of Britain (1969), works to represent and perhaps replace the history it portrays. As the title suggests, Battle of Britain is an example of a particularly popular subgenre of historical film we've already encountered in this unit: the war film. The historical Battle of Britain was fought over a period of several months in the summer of 1940 when it appeared to many that the fate of western civilisation hung in the balance, when only Britain (and the British Commonwealth) remained standing against Hitler. Having already conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium, the German army had just crushed France within weeks and ejected the British army from the Continent; Germany now controlled the northern coast of Europe from the Bay of Biscay to the North Cape. A key element of this Blitzkrieg or lightning war was the striking power of the German air force, or Luftwaffe, to which Hitler now entrusted the task of battering the Royal Air Force (RAF) into submission and hence Britain itself. Against overwhelming odds, the RAF's fighter pilots repelled the Luftwaffe's bombers, saved Britain from invasion and inflicted the first defeat on Nazi Germany. Or so goes what is sometimes called the 'myth of 1940', which Battle of Britain both draws upon and passes on. A myth, in this sense, is not necessarily false; but its correspondence to wie es eigentlich gewesen is beside the point - it's how we want to believe it really happened. Much like hyperreality, in fact, and we might suggest that this is what makes historical films such compelling vehicles for the propagation of historical myths. (Think Gallipoli (1981) and the Anzac myth for another example.)

While the particular narrative of 1940 presented by Battle of Britain, both what it includes and what it leaves out (what of the Royal Navy? wasn't the Blitz worth more than a few scenes? was Britain really in danger of a military defeat in the summer of 1940?), it's interesting that few war films these days attempt to portray the big picture in the way that Battle of Britain tried to, telling the story of the whole battle from start to finish and from the point of view of the high command as well as the men (and women) at the sharp end. War films now tend to focus on smaller, more personal stories, for example Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Hurt Locker (2008) or American Sniper (2014). Yet individuals also feature prominently in Battle of Britain, as a way of humanising the grand narrative as well as -- not incidentally -- providing roles for a cavalcade of film stars intended to ensure the project's profitability. The commercial aspect of making historical films should never be forgotten; even where the desire to tell things as they really happened is present, the desire to turn a profit is usually paramount. A war film on such a big scale as Battle of Britain was an expensive proposition and its makers (who were partly responsible for the hugely successful James Bond films) made compromises in order to attract a younger audience with little direct experience of or interest in the war. But this did not mean that historical authenticity was neglected altogether; to the contrary, as S. P. McKenzie shows, Battle of Britain's producers went to great lengths to secure airworthy Spitfires, Hurricanes, Messerschmitts and Heinkels, even modifying some examples when they differed too much from the types which flew during the Battle. (Supposedly, these aircraft constituted the world's 35th largest air force, albeit an unarmed one.) Whether or not this kind of attention to detail tells us much worth knowing about how it really was can be questioned -- it certainly did not rescue the film's financial fortunes (it only made a profit after more than 30 years, after being released on DVD). But whatever the motivation, and despite (or because of) the lack of CGI, the gorgeous vintage aeroplanes and the spectacular aerial cinematography clearly produce reality and hyperreality effects of the kind Barthes and Baudrillard talk about. Battle of Britain is still very watchable, easy to immerse yourself in and imagine you were there. From a historian's point of view, is that a problem? Or as Barthes himself argued, is this displacement embedded in the process of writing history itself?

These are the readings:

Tony Aldgate, 'The Battle of Britain on film', in Jeremy A. Crang and Paul Addison (eds), The Burning Blue: A New History of the Battle of Britain (London: Pimlico, 2000), pp. 191-206.

Mark Connelly, 'The fewest of the few: the Battle of Britain, June-September 1940', in We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004), pp. 95-127.

S. P. Mackenzie, 'The big picture: Battle of Britain (1969)', in The Battle of Britain on Screen: ‘The Few’ in British Film and Television Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 75-97.

Malcom Smith, 'Invasion and the Battle of Britain', in Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 52-69.

There aren't many reasonably scholarly secondary sources relating to Battle of Britain. Mackenzie is excellent, and there are one or two others, but I've had to pad out the list with texts relating to the Battle itself and to British memory of it (and even an old Airminded post). I'd be grateful if anyone can think of any others.

Alan Allport. Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939-1945. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Alan's –– since he's a longtime friend of this blog I feel justified in the slight informality -- last book looked at what happened to the British soldier when he went home after the Second World War ended. This is much more ambitious in that it's about everything that happened to the British soldier before Demobbed. Hopefully Alan will write a social history of the RAF next. (Well, I can dream, can't I?) In any case, he will no doubt be pleased to learn that it's on sale in Australian bookshops, since that's where I found it; and that I showed both Browned Off and Demobbed to a colleague who promptly decided to buy his own copies for his current research. That's outreach and impact, right there.

Anne Witchard. England's Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War. Melbourne: Penguin, 2014. A very cute little (less than a hundred pages) book and a useful parallel to the Germanophibia with which I am better acquainted. Witchard argues that the casualties of the First World War led to fears of racial decline and hence the identification of the Chinese as a racial enemy. I know what you're thinking -- didn't M. P. Shiel, Jack London, and for that matter Sax Rohmer himself all write about the Yellow Peril before 1914? Well, yes. That's a good point. Hopefully Witchard will address it.

A scare was created in England last week by the reported appearance of a mysterious airship at night over the East Coast. Two residents of Ipswich separately saw the searchlight of the airship, and one declares he heard the engines. Residents in Hunstanton, a watering-place in Norfolk-on-the-Wash, state that they saw three bright lights pass from the east and disappear in the north-west after hovering overhead for half an hour. The steamer Arcadia also reported that she saw an airship to the north of the Orkneys. The airship is believed to have been a German visitor.

Artistic interpretations of phantom airships are not common; I'm not sure if this particular one is Australian or if it was sourced from the British press (or elsewhere), or for that matter whether it was drawn specifically to represent a phantom airship or just a generic one.1 It's a fanciful depiction, with its double-decker gondola and stubby wings. Phantom airships were almost universally equipped with searchlights, which were much less common features of real airships (though not vanishingly so). It is perhaps a reasonable representation of what people thought they were seeing when they saw phantom airships. On the ground below is a prosperous-looking town, but by the sea in the foreground is what might be a military base of some kind -- it's tempting to say those sheds are hangars, but I suspect it's a military or naval depot, as popular strategists believed that these would be the primary targets in a Zeppelin attack on Britain.

Thanks to David Waldron for the image.

Another contemporary drawing of a phantom airship appeared in the Whitby Gazette, 7 March 1913, p. 12, depicting the Othello incident; but the online version is not great; a better one is in Nigel Watson, UFOs of the First World War: Phantom Airships, Balloons, Aircraft and Other Mysterious Aerial Phenomena (Stroud: History Press, 2015), p. 54. ↩

David Clarke. How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. London: Aurum Press, 2015. Clarke is a journalist and academic who has also worked with the National Archives on the declassification of Britain's official UFO files. Here he takes a wider view, providing a social history of ufology (a subject he has already tackled, with Andy Roberts) framed through his own personal journey from believer to sceptic. Given that, I'm a bit disappointed that there seems to be little about phantom airships, a topic which he pioneered. Still, there's plenty of interest here.

Robin Prior. When Britain Saved the West: The Story of 1940. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Or, to be slightly more precise, when Britain saved the West by saving itself - Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz (and Churchill rather than Chamberlain or indeed Halifax). Knowing Prior's previous work (mostly on battles of the First World War), this will be thoroughly researched and logically argued. At first glance, it's not clear that he is challenging much of the historiographical consensus on 1940, however: for example he allows that Fighter Command had the Battle of Britain well under control, while making the point that this wasn't obvious to contemporaries. Which is to say that Prior is sensible. As Prior says there aren't many military histories of 1940 as a whole, so a fresh, integrated and scholarly account is welcome.

Nigel Watson. UFOs of the First World War: Phantom Airships, Balloons, Aircraft and Other Mysterious Aerial Phenomena. Stroud: History Press, 2015. With Clarke, a sometime-collaborator, Watson is the other major pioneer of the history of phantom airships (and who also is more interested in their cultural significance than the remote possibility of physical reality). The collection which he edited, The Scareship Mystery (2000), has long been my standard reference on the subject for both peacetime and wartime mystery aircraft scares -- not that there are many competitors, mind. This is something of an update, a bit less in-depth but also broader. In fact, apart from the more usual mystery aircraft wave of the period, there is a chapter on the Australian mystery aeroplane panic in 1918 drawing upon my own research, which is very gratifying. There is also some information on Norwegian mystery aircraft scares, in 1908 and during the First World War, which I don't know much about. A chapter on wartime spy scares and other rumours bears on my own research in this area.

Blaine R. Pardoe. Never Wars: The US Plans to Invade the World. Fonthill: 2014. NB: 'Plans' is a noun, not a verb! This is a summary and analysis of various war plans made by the United States between the 1900s and the 1940s, from the Azores to Mexico. Two versions of War Plan Red, war with the British Empire, are presented, one from 1905 and one from 1935 (including the use of poison gas against Canada). Perhaps the most intriguing is War Plan Black from 1914 (not the better-known 1916 version): the German invasion of the United States following the defeat of the Allies in the war in Europe. It's not quite The War in the Air: the projected German forces include only a detachment of aircraft, and Pardoe suggests that German airpower may been decisive, given the American lack of it (which seems unlikely, given the actual capabilities of aviation in 1914). Sadly, the US Navy's 1908-9 plans for the invasion of Australia and New Zealand don't rate a chapter.

David Payne sent me this great photograph of Malaya XV Cheon Teong, Ngoh Bee, a B.E.2c which was donated to the British war effort as part of the Imperial Aircraft FlotillaI blogged aboutlast year. David's grandfather, Arthur Chapman, is in the cockpit; he was an engineer at Shorts on the Isle of Sheppey, though not necessarily at the time of this photo. David provides the following information:

Arthur Chapman (1877-1937) worked as Shorts "head man" from '09 but I don't know how long for. He taught himself to fly and helped teach the first four naval volunteers to fly. Also he was in the passenger seat when Commander Samson flew the first hydroplane off the Hibernia at the review of the fleet in 1912. At what date he left Shorts I don't know although he joined the RFC in 1917.

Otherwise the details of this photo was taken are unknown, including the identity of the two men standing in front of the B.E.2c. It would likely have been taken in 1916, which is when the Over-Seas Club's book recording the growth of the Imperial Aircraft Flotilla was published; Malaya XV was the 15th of 17 aeroplanes in the Malayan squadron.

I notice that while the names of this aircraft's donors are given as Cheon Teong and Ngoh Bee, in the Over-Seas Club's book the first name is given as Cheow Teng.1 This seems to be an error; at least the name is given as Cheon Teong in a contemporary Singaporean newspaper.2 Either way, I hope he was pleased with his aeroplane.

William Mulligan. The Great War for Peace. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014. It may not have been the war that ended war, but Mulligan argues that we nevertheless shouldn't underestimate the contribution the First World War made to peace, not only through the usual suspects (the League of Nations and a slew of other international organisations) but also through normalising the idea of peace.

David Stevens. In All Respects Ready: Australia's Navy in World War One. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2014. When I bought this I thought it was part of OUP's Centenary History of Australia and the Great War, of which Michael Molkentin's Australia and the War in the Air is the first volume (of five). Oddly, though, it's not, and the series isn't going to have an entry on the naval war. Either way it looks like a comprehensive and accessible overview.

Amanda Laugesen, Furphies and Whizz-bangs: Anzac Slang from the Great War, South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2015. Did you know that a word as quintessentially Aussie as 'Aussie' was a product of the First World War? Well, you do now, because I just told you; and I know it because I just read it (among other things) in this book.

Diana Preston, A Higher Form of Killing: Six Weeks in World War I that Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare, New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015. Preston argues that the period in April-May 1915 was essentially where the era of weapons of mass destruction began, spanning as it did the first use of poison gas, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the first Zeppelin raid on London. I think she has a point; while I would place this in a slightly longer context of brutality and destruction (Belgium, Scarborough, etc), the conjunction of these events may well have marked a watershed in the mental shift to a total war, at least in English-speaking countries.

Errol W. Martyn. A Passion for Flight: New Zealand Aviation Before the Great War. Volume 3: The Joe Hammond Story and Military Beginnings 1910-1914. Upper Riccarton: Volplane Press, 2013. Volume 1 is very good so I decided it was worth buying volumes 2 and 3. More narrative than analytical, but there is a lot of material here for early NZ airmindedness and aerial theatre, drawn largely from the contemporary press but also with significant use of archival material. Very well illustrated too, with lots of photographs and ephemera. I don't know of anything equivalent for Britain, unfortunately, though of course that would be a much bigger job.

Hector Hawton. Night Bombing. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1944. A rather interesting secondhand bookshop find. Hawton was a novelist, rationalist and during the war a flight lieutenant in the RAFVR. Here he has written an explanation, a history, and a justification of British bombing strategy in the Second World War. It's less overtly propagandistic than J. M. Spaight's wartimewritings, I think, Hawton grants that the Blitz was largely directed at industrial targets, as is Bomber Command's campaign; but he also straightforwardly and even proudly lists the urban areas the British have destroyed and the civilians they have killed. Perceptive, too; he speculates about what might happen if the power of the atom were ever harnessed for war (noting that science often moves more quickly than laypeople think) and suggests that no nation would be able to maintain a monopoly of such a weapon, but also that it would be too terrible to be used.

Richard Hillary. The Last Enemy. London: Macmillan, 1950 [1942]. A classic of Australian war literature.

Michael Molkentin. Australia and the War in Air. The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War, volume 1. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2014. Both an operational and an institutional history of the Australian Flying Corps, as well as the origins of military aviation in Australia before 1914 and the birth of the RAAF, but also a contribution to a much broader historiography about the RFC/RAF and the development of early airpower (think Sydney Wise's Canadian Airmen and the First World War). And it even finds space to mention the Australian mystery aircraft of 1909 and 1918. The book of Michael's PhD thesis, but don't hold that it against it.